


Beautiful Imperfections

by betagyre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - No Time Travel, Dark, Dark Hermione Granger, Dark fluff, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gothic, Horcruxes, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, Lovecraftian, Married Couple, Mild Smut, Mind Manipulation, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Obscurus (Harry Potter), Out of Character, Poignant, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-07-11 01:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7019842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betagyre/pseuds/betagyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Self-contained fics for Tomione prompts and challenges.  None of these are in my <i>Choosing Grey</i> AU, and most will have a decidedly Gothic atmosphere.</p><p>Currently includes:<br/>Afternoon Tea (1920s Lovecraftian AU)<br/>The Other Library<br/>Somewhere Else (Halloween challenge)<br/>Shadow (Dark AU)<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Afternoon Tea

**Author's Note:**

> To avoid cluttering my profile with short fics, I’m expanding this into a collection of Tomione one-shots that do not occur in my _Choosing Grey_ AU. The first of them, “Afternoon Tea,” I wrote for Tomione Day (May 29), so it is the first in the collection. I may write more one-shots in a Lovecraftian AU, because I am rather fond of that crossover, but for now I’m going to be adding new prompt and challenge fills to this fic. If any chapters do end up occurring in the same setting as an existing piece, I’ll make note of that, but otherwise it should be assumed that they are all distinct.
> 
> As noted, I anticipate that most of these will be distinctly more Gothic than _Choosing Grey_. And the title of this collection is meant as a description of the ’ship itself, not necessarily a description of these pieces. ;-)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1920s Lovecraftian AU. Two years ago the Head Girl started to date the Head Boy because she supposed she might as well—and to spite another boy.
> 
> One year ago she married him, for the same reasons.
> 
> One month ago he went on a trip to Arkham, and everything changed.
> 
> Written for Tomione Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU set in the 20s in which Tom was in Hermione’s age cohort (no time travel). It borrows very heavily from H. P. Lovecraft as well, because if it is set in the 20s, it simply has to. In-depth knowledge of Lovecraft’s stories is not required to understand this fic, however. It’s just a fluff fic (to the extent that’s possible for this pairing) that is not meant to be taken too seriously.
> 
> Tom did not open the Chamber of Secrets in this AU. He did pay a visit to Little Hangleton.
> 
> **Warnings** : Hardcore fans of Ron Weasley (if there are any here) might not want to read this. On a more serious note, some readers may consider the end to imply dubcon, given certain other implications.

_May 1925._

Hermione smiled as the post owl landed on the ledge of a window in her solarium. Without rising from her chair, she flicked her wand to open the window and let the bird inside. Flapping its wings, it delivered its letter straight to Hermione’s little table, dropping it with trained precision next to her tea set.

Right on schedule.

She sipped her afternoon tea, gave the owl a treat, and opened the letter. It had been several days since she had received her husband’s first letter. He was overseas right now, visiting the wizarding city of Arkham, Massachusetts for political reasons.

Supposedly. Hermione was starting to wonder about that. A crease formed on her forehead as this thought lessened the comfortable ease of her daily tea ritual. Arkham, along with some other towns in wizarding New England, was full of Dark wizards. Tom was awfully interested in that, if his first letter—full of eagerness to visit the famous Miskatonic Institute of Advanced Magic, the closest thing wizards had to a university—was indicative.

 

_Dearest Hermione,_ she began to read.

_It was a frustrating day. I do not like Rich Pickman. The man is a lunatic, not to put too fine a point upon it. I have reason to believe that he “hears voices.” If I find out who chose him to be my historian and travel guide, woe be unto that person._

_Today he invited me on a fruitless visit to the bank of the Miskatonic River, for some reason that he would never explain. As you know, I have no objection to touring nature, provided that there is something to see – some element of history, magic, or mystique that is shrouded by natural barriers. I have heard rumors of water beings in this area, highly advanced ones, and I am unable so far to get any clear answers from these people about the subject. A closer-lipped bunch I have never met. It may just be a large population of grindylows, or some sort of local merfolk. I had hopes that Pickman would show me something to elucidate this tale._

_No such luck. There was nothing except muddy bank, opaque water, and slippery rocks. On that subject, I did narrowly avoid being cursed as I stood near what Pickman had literally just explained was a twenty-meter-tall underwater shelf._

_Hermione, I think it is obvious that Pickman is trying to murder me. Why, I don’t know, except that he is a lunatic._

_He won’t succeed. Don’t worry about that. I am in no real danger from him._

_I asked him numerous times what we were to see by the river. When he gave only evasive answers, I attempted to perform Legilimency on him, but the wretched bastard can block me, despite otherwise being as unsubtle in his magic as a first-year Gryffindor in Defense class. It is extremely frustrating._

_In other news, my visit to the Arkham public library was disappointing. The books were damnably mundane, more popular reading and little scholarly material. Of course, the tomes that locals speak of in hushed voices would likely be in the vaults of Miskatonic, assuming they even exist. I suppose I will have to ask for an escort. I am – finally – meeting Mayor Waite tomorrow, and I intend to express my extreme dissatisfaction with this madman they sent me. I expect the mayor will be embarrassed, at the least, and may want to make amends._

_I hope that all is well in London._

_Yours, etc.,_

_Tom_

 

Hermione set the letter down. Her hands were shaking as she opened the bottle of firewhisky and poured a good, strong shot into her tea.

Why had Tom gone into a nest of crazed provincial Dark wizards who “heard voices” and wanted to kill him? What if—God forbid it, what if they succeeded?

Hermione sipped her spiked tea.

_It isn’t fair. It was our anniversary, and then he left for this trip. Two years of—being with him. Two years, and I had only just realized I…._

She could not complete that thought. It was too painful.

* * *

  _February 1923._

Professor Slughorn turned to Tom. “Tom, I called you here to talk to you about Miss Granger. She’s still upset about Weasley and Brown,” he said, oblivious to the impropriety of gossiping about students—or discussing a student’s personal life—with another student. Tom, after all, was _special_. “A scandal and a pity, really, but not wholly surprising.”

Tom Riddle fingered the rim of his wineglass, the gold ring on his finger sparkling in the candlelight. “Yes, I understand you, Professor, and I agree that neither of them is particularly brilliant,” he said scathingly. _“I_ can only pity the baby, though. I’m surprised they were allowed to stay, but I suppose it would be unfair not to accommodate them, given that it is the next-to-last term of their final year.”

Slughorn sighed. “Headmaster Dippet was persuaded. Professor Dumbledore, you know—”

“I know.” Tom’s voice indicated that that particular subject was closed.

Slughorn was aware of Tom’s antipathy for the Transfiguration professor. He quickly changed the subject. “Well, the reason I mention that tawdry business at all is poor Miss Granger. She carried a torch for Weasley for three and a half years, and it was so sad to see the way he ridiculed her for being studious—anyway, I think you should ask her on a date, Tom, next Hogsmeade visit. I think it would cheer her up, and remind her that there are quality young men more deserving of her interest.”

“Certainly, Professor,” he said. He smiled, but the words were emotionless, and the smile did not reach his eyes.

* * *

 Hermione was vastly relieved to get a new epistle a mere five days after the previous one. After Tom had written of the murder attempt, she had hardly had any sleep at all since.

 

_Dearest Hermione,_

_Much better news today. Pickman has been sent back to Boston where he belongs, so he can ritually sacrifice someone else to the voices in his head. I suppose you would tell me that I should care, but I don’t. He is not my problem anymore, and that is all that concerns me._

 

If he were present in the house right now, Hermione actually would not scold him at all for that sentiment, she thought. She agreed wholeheartedly with him. The man was the Americans’ problem, not that of her Tom.

 

_George Waite is a capable mayor, and he apologized profusely for the behavior of Pickman. I think it was sincere; I did some brief surface Legilimency on him and it seemed to be. He should have picked someone from his own office as my tour guide at the very first, because finally I have received the grand tour of Arkham. It is a fascinating place. I already knew it would be so from a magical and historical perspective, of course, and that did not disappoint at all. I wish I had more time, and I wish you were here to see some of this. It is not nearly as old as the magical places of our country, of course, but it is well worth seeing. I intend to visit Miskatonic as soon as I can, and on that subject, the city’s tolerance of the Dark Arts is a good thing. They don’t have an interfering old crooked-nosed moralist like Dumbledore in a position of influence here. Waite himself is openly a Dark wizard, and I am certain that he is a highly accomplished one. I can see it in his eyes._

 

_Is that so?_ Hermione thought with some dismay, her fears confirmed. Tom had never liked Dumbledore, could rarely resist getting in a gratuitous dig at the man, and he had always had an interest in the Dark Arts of which she did not entirely approve. It was a legitimate branch of magic, and many new advances came from scholars of the field, but others lost themselves in it. Miskatonic was a great research institution, but she knew all too well that Tom would focus on its notoriously extensive library of Dark Magic. And the last thing he needed was to form a friendship with an “accomplished Dark wizard.” She wondered what he meant about seeing it in Waite’s eyes. Perhaps it was a Legilimency reference. But if the man was open about practicing the Dark Arts, why would Tom need to do that?

She scowled and continued reading.

 

_I also learned about the government and social policies of the city. As we suspected, the magical population is a minority even though the town’s existence is secret to the masses of Muggles and it purports to be the “largest all-magical city in the world.” The true majority of the population is composed of non-magical relatives, most of whom call themselves Squibs. I suppose some of them must technically be so._

_That is well, I suppose. You did persuade me that “Muggle-borns” are better assimilated than not, and that you have a right to the wizarding world. But one disturbing aspect of Arkham is that they seem to have many more Squibs in families than we do. In the numbers that Waite gave me, the Squib birthrate for two wizarding parents is one in eight, and it’s close to one in four for a Squib and a witch or wizard. I can hear you now, Hermione – “The Americans must not have intermarried as much as British wizard families have” – and you may be right. Prior to Seclusion, most wizarding families in Europe had married Muggles for centuries, and I gather that the Squib-wizard birth ratio in that time was similar to what Arkham sees now. It decreased after Seclusion, but, of course, so did the overall birthrate, with so many fewer partners around._

_Waite assures me that the ratio of Squib births to wizard births is decreasing each year, but without the corresponding overall depopulation that we saw beginning in the 1700s. Critically, when two non-magical Arkhamites have a child, the odds of its being magical are close to fifty percent. They are “Muggle-borns,” but apparently Arkham has so many more than we do because their policy makes it profoundly more likely that “Muggles” with incomplete wizarding genes will meet. In short, if your theories of our history are correct, the Arkhamites are doing Seclusion the way we should have from the start: including all these people who are non-magical but still have some magic genes. What can I say? It does seem to work._

_On that subject, there are some peculiar linguistic differences. Waite was offended at the term “Muggle-born.” I smirk at what he would think of our other term. They use “half-blood” and “pureblood” very loosely, and the former term is apparently – and inexplicably – a slur here. Most people here claim to be pureblood, but if Waite’s census numbers are right, then by British standards virtually no one actually is. Bloody Americans._

_Still, it’s an interesting social experiment, and I will grant that the European model is creating demographic decline, whereas Arkham’s magical population is increasing. Definitely food for thought. I will have a complete report of the Arkham model for the Ministry, needless to say. We need to do something differently._

 

Hermione sighed as she sipped her tea. Tom had been obsessed with wizarding “blood” in school, and they had had many vigorous debates about the subject during their first year of dating. Finally, as he had written, she had persuaded him to drop his prejudice against Muggle-born wizards and witches with the information that they— _we,_ she thought—had wizard ancestors just as anyone else did. It was a breakthrough, but clearly, Tom’s interest in wizarding demography continued.

She supposed it was reasonable for him to feel that way. Their country’s magical population _was_ in decline, and something new needed to be considered. That was the purpose of his trip to Arkham, to study their policies.

She didn’t like that he was so obviously struck with this Mayor Waite—and he was. Tom did not bestow compliments freely, and his letter about the man was, for him, extreme praise. The mayor of Arkham was apparently a very intelligent, well-educated, successful… Dark wizard. She didn’t care for that. Still, there appeared to be positive aspects to the association. Travel was good at opening minds, and if wizarding Britain could learn lessons from a well-managed magical city, so much the better.

Hermione still wanted him back soon. She missed his company, in more than one way. It had been three weeks since they had slept together. For the first time since their marriage, she had missed that and wanted it.

She drank the last of her tea, leaving the dregs in the bottom of the cup. That caught her eye. Hermione had never had much use for Divination, unlike Tom, but anyone could see shapes in tea leaves. At the moment she saw an oval. It was undoubtedly caused by the curvature of the cup and the force of gravity.

Idly she fingered the locket around her neck. He had wanted her to wear it when he was away, and she had been so unhappy that he was leaving that she naturally followed this one wish.

* * *

_August 1923._

Hermione was surprised that Tom continued to ask her out after they had finished school and passed their NEWTs. She knew perfectly well that he had only done it because Slughorn put him up to it, so she had expected it to cease when school ended. She had no illusions that he actually _liked_ her in a romantic way. His attentions were perfunctory and proper: taking her coat, the occasional icy peck on the cheek, holding hands while walking. She preferred not to hold his right hand, because he wore a ring on that hand that had some strange sort of magic charmed into it, something that almost seemed to get into her mind and whisper to her. When she asked him about it, he looked startled for a moment, but he assured her that it was a very old heirloom from his mother and probably was meant to be handled only by someone in the family.

Their conversations were intellectual, as they had been throughout their tenure as prefects and Heads. It was perfectly civil, and the content was often highly interesting, but there was nothing romantic about it.

Hermione wondered if she would ever experience romance. Her only fancy had ended in utter humiliation. She knew on some level that it was unfair, but she blamed Lavender Brown. _They probably did it on the sofa in the common room, she was so shameless. Always slobbering on his face in public. If that insipid tart hadn’t seduced Ron, he wouldn’t have been trapped—_

She quickly brushed off these thoughts. No point in dwelling on it. There was now a Mrs. Ronald Weasley. She stood no chance with Harry, either; he had been disgusted with his best friend but had stood by him throughout the scandal. Hermione just could not do that. She was too angry and bitter, so her best friends had drifted away from her. Gossip now held that Harry was engaged to Ron’s sister.

And Hermione now was seeing a young man who clearly had only begun it to placate his favorite professor, and whose current motives were utterly inscrutable—because she was _used to it_ and it was _expected._ It was “Hermione and Tom” now; they were always paired whenever their colleagues held weekend luncheons or lawn parties.

They both had jobs at the Ministry. He had hesitated over accepting his best offer, a high-level position in International Magical Cooperation, but when Hermione took a job in the Department of Mysteries, that seemed to give him the resolution to take it. They had been given advances on their salaries in order to get places to live, since he was an orphan and her family lived in the Muggle world. Hermione did not actually require the money; her family was reasonably well-to-do, but it was very nice to have that independence. She knew that Muggle women would not have the opportunities she had.

The money also meant that Tom bought her gifts—real, permanent gifts, not just conjured flowers. Some of them must have come from Muggle shops, but she knew he visited the Dark Arts shop Borgin and Burkes as well. It… troubled her, somewhat, but she supposed that many high-profile members of society visited it. Collectors gave the place their custom too.

Flowers. Cards. Boxes of candy. Books. Knickknacks. A… bracelet of silver and jade? Her eyebrows flew up when he presented that. What _were_ his intentions?

* * *

Hermione sipped her tea—peppermint this time—and caressed the locket. It was almost a reflexive action now. Even if she handled it without really thinking, her thoughts—whatever they might have been focused on before—quickly turned to him.

She did not object to that. She missed him. In her position, it would have been all too easy to feel very little at his absence, but fortunately that had not happened. Instead, she had realized and admitted her feelings for him.

 

_My dear Hermione,_

_Miskatonic is everything I hoped it would be and more. I have met several international scholars of magic. Much of the efficiency of wizarding New England is explained now. They don’t have to rely on owls; researchers at Miskatonic had converted the Muggle telephone and telegraph to magic as soon as they were invented. More importantly, they don’t have to turn their economy over to the goblins or to the fickle gold market; they have worked out a way of magically linking their currency to the credit of their government. If that sounds nebulous, it is, but they don’t have to deal with goblins for domestic transactions. Miskatonic economic Dark wizards devised that system too._

_How, you might wonder, does the place support itself as a pure research institution—no tuition money and no profits? That is the truly radical part. Well-to-do families and local magical businesses support it, but the government – the Department of Magic, they call it – pays for a majority of it with tax revenue._

_The mayor once studied here, of course. Most persons of any importance in this city have. His word gained me admittance to the Pickman Collection, the most private and restricted part of the library system._

_–Yes, it is named for the family of that lunatic who was my first guide. Apparently they are from Salem and have been Dark wizards for generations, and they donated many of their books to the institute._

_Anyhow, there are two tiers of libraries. That part open for the public to browse is stocked somewhat better than the Hogwarts general library, and it contains several titles that I am sure the crooked-nosed meddler of a Deputy Head would want put in our Restricted Section. The Secured Collections are the equivalent of the Restricted Section, more or less—but again, with titles that one would not find at all in Hogwarts. The Pickman Collection is one of the Secured Collections, the most difficult to access. Most scholars there cannot get in. No, I did not lord over them my “friendship” with the mayor that gained me access._

_I’m sure you are bursting with curiosity, and I regret that you were not here for this. I have preserved my memories before they fade or alter, and I will describe it in greater detail when I return home. But this much I will say: The Necronomicon is not a myth. I have seen it with my own eyes. And no, I did not make a copy of it or perform any of the rites described in it. I approve of this city and do not wish to create an Arkham horror—or risk being consumed myself, for that matter._

_You’re welcome._

_Tom_

 

Hermione sighed in resignation. It was pointless to bemoan his fascination with the Dark Arts. He was interested in it, and that was that. There was never any chance that he would have avoided the more dubious collections in the Miskatonic library system. At least he had the awareness and self-control not to start anything that he could not finish, she supposed.

* * *

_September 1923._

Tom heaved a breath, reclaiming his strength with the influx of oxygen into his lungs. He hurried out of Borgin and Burkes with a parcel that he quickly hid inside his robes as he closed the door. It was nighttime, and Knockturn Alley was deserted, with only a few seedy characters huddled drunkenly in corners. He walked up the street, making sure to keep his pace casual and unhurried.

At the end of the street, an incongruous figure stood waiting, an elegant silhouette of a stylish fedora atop a pretty coiffure of curls, with fine robes covering a Muggle gown. Distance and darkness obscured the person’s face, but Tom’s heart jolted. He knew who it was. He had not wanted her to see him here.

Hermione stood tall, holding her dignified taupe duster-like robes close, proudly ignoring the shady characters and their questionable sanity. “I thought you might be on this street,” she said as he approached. “What were you doing?”

He didn’t break his composure. His eyes did not so much as flicker—or gleam unnatural colors. He reached into his robes and smoothly pulled out a book. “I ordered this from Obscurus a while back,” he said, watching as her eyes widened in pleasure at the title. It was a rare tome, a transcription of ancient Celtic rituals.

The next morning, the _Daily Prophet_ ’s lead headline shouted of the sudden death of Caractacus Burke in his own shop. It was a shocking business, since there were suspicions he had died of the Killing Curse, and Hermione was relieved that Tom had not lingered on that dangerous street the night before.

Tom took Hermione out to dinner that night. Afterward, he gave her two articles of jewelry. One was a gold locket that he said had belonged to his mother. The other was a diamond ring.

* * *

_April 1924._

Hermione’s first real kiss had occurred when she accepted Tom’s proposal. To her absolute shock, it had been—

Hesitant at first. They had almost paused, seemingly embarrassed about it, but then she felt his hand cup her cheek, and they had plunged ahead after the nearly imperceptible moment of doubt.

Then heat and slickness and him clutching at her face and her tearing his hair and, yes, pain, those bites would leave her lips swollen, and—

She had not expected intense passion when her fiancé had obviously only proposed to her because it made sense for them to marry and she had accepted him only because she couldn’t articulate a good reason for refusing.

_No,_ she thought a few days before her wedding, _that’s not entirely true. When Ron sees the wedding pictures in the newspaper… and then has to look at his hussy of a wife…._

There was no point thinking that way, she reminded herself. She _had_ pledged faith. Tom did not deserve the competition of another man, even if only in her mind and in the form of spiteful revenge fantasies. He had never wronged her.

She was kissed on the lips for the first time when she got engaged, and she lost her virginity on her wedding night. She had hoped it would be like that first kiss, a pleasant surprise.

It wasn’t. It began that way, as they removed each other’s clothing and she caught him staring at her body rather greedily. He wanted her. He wanted _her._ It was thrilling and flattering, and it made her second-guess her assumptions about why he was with her.

But then it hurt, and he said he couldn’t stop, and that ruined everything. It became just awkward, lying on her back as he moved in her, this young man that she knew so well and yet not at all, just squeezing her eyes shut and waiting for him to do what he had to.

Afterward, it was embarrassing—and horrifying, as the magnitude of her choice crashed into her brain.

_What have I done?_ her thoughts screamed after they had separated. _When did I let “the familiar and comfortable” become “the inevitable”? When did I, Hermione Granger, rational and intellectual, make major decisions about my life to spite someone else?_

She would have to find some way to make this work.

* * *

Hermione scowled, setting the empty porcelain teacup down with a faint clatter. She needed more, and she needed it spiked, but at the moment she was unable to stop staring indignantly at the letter in her hands.

 

_My dear Hermione,_

_Your letters are delights to read, as flirtatious as they have become. I’m hurt that you wait till I am abroad to show me this side of yourself. You fondle my old locket at night, do you? That is the subtext of the comment in your last letter that “it is always around my neck, even as I sleep.” I’m flattered. As for your observation that your thoughts focus on me while you hold it, and your question about how, exactly, I enchanted it… so suspicious, aren’t you? Perhaps, darling, you simply think about me because it is mine._

_This week I had the privilege of meeting frequently with Selina Marsh, the American Undersecretary of Magical Law and Justice. The title is a mouthful and the witch is a handful. She is approximately forty-five, though she does not look but thirty. In fact, she looks like a Malfoy, except that her hair is more golden than white-blonde (and it is short, cut in the Muggle style), and her eyes are large. Almost too large, really, but bright blue and very expressive. I have had decent rapport with her, because her story is rather similar to mine: an orphan who raised herself to a high post by ambition and merit. Also like me, her wizarding relatives lived in squalor, apparently. There is a town called Innsmouth that is mostly magical and – like Arkham – also unknown to most of the local Muggles, and respectable people in Arkham consider the residents the worst sort of degenerate riffraff. Undersecretary Marsh is from there. She began her career as an Auror._

_I called her a handful, and I am sure you wish me to elaborate upon that. She is like you in two critical ways: She is intensely ambitious and profoundly stubborn. I bore witness to an argument between her and Mayor Waite, so I know of what I speak. You would either like her or kill her. I hope you can meet her someday._

_Yours,_

_Tom_

_P.S. I assure you that visiting Miskatonic did not corrupt me. I have experimented with magic that is darker than anything I read about there that I would actually be willing to do._

 

Who did he think he was, describing another woman to her in such familiar, approving terms? Especially after that opening paragraph making sport of her for being flirty and wondering how he had enchanted his locket! It _was_ charmed in some way. Hermione was absolutely certain of that. How—and _why—_ she could not say, but he had done something to it before leaving. How dare he imply that it was all in her head.

The entire letter was a brazen bit of cheek that she wanted to set on fire, but she knew that would be a bad idea. No, she was going to keep this one, if for no other reason than to shove it down his throat when he returned. How dare he describe to _her_ how attractive, how _similar to him,_ some other woman was.

* * *

_April 1925._

They celebrated their anniversary at the restaurant where they had become engaged. It was the proper thing to do. The Riddles always did things very properly. He was a perfect gentleman to her when they were in public, and not that different in private. It was proper, too, to make love—though that really did not seem like the correct term—every now and then. Just enough to prove to each other that they were a married couple and not the Head Boy and Girl, talking about their Defense project.

It didn’t hurt anymore, at least. In fact, it was quite nice—as long as she could focus on the physical pleasure and not think too hard about anything else.

They Apparated home from their anniversary dinner. He held the door open for her, put his hat on the rack, and nodded at her in acknowledgment before heading to his study. She felt somehow… disappointed.

_He doesn’t seem to care that much that we are practically roommates. Why did he even marry me?_ she wondered, sitting down on a velvet-covered sofa. _Was it just for the social status that comes with marriage? That’s sad, if so._

But she could not blame him. She had agreed. She had agreed to it, because she had become cynical about love and she wanted to make another man—a _married_ man, with a baby—jealous. To what end? What had she hoped to accomplish? It seemed asinine now.

_It wasn’t Lavender Brown’s fault, not entirely._

The thought that she had been keeping from her conscious mind for two years was now forced to the forefront of her thoughts.

_It takes two._

_And Ron never appreciated me. He mocked my library visits and my bookishness, but thought himself entitled to my homework—or, failing that, my corrections to his—at the end of the day. He ridiculed me because I didn’t know the latest Quidditch news… and because I_ did _know about current events and political debates affecting our world._

_He mocked me for years because we liked different things. It wasn’t envy. He held my interests in contempt._

_He never respected me. I should feel sorry for Lavender, not hate her._

_I deserved better._

_I have better._

She closed her eyes, clutching the green velvet upholstery like life support. Her head started to spin. She blamed it on the drinks she’d had at the restaurant, but she knew it wasn’t entirely that.

When she finally was ready to go to bed, Tom was asleep.

The next day he told her his plans: He was going to travel to Arkham, Massachusetts, to learn about the largest wizarding city in the world. He would leave in three days and be gone “at least a month.”

“At least.” No specified return date.

She was devastated, though she was not willing to articulate why.

* * *

_Dear Tom,_

_Your latest letter was truly fascinating. If I didn’t know better, I might think you liked Undersecretary Marsh better than Mayor Waite. That can’t possibly be the case, can it?_

_Please come home soon. I have thought a great deal while you were away, and I have realized several things that I have not wanted to acknowledge until now. Things will be different between us from now on. I promise._

_Yours, and I do mean that,_

_Hermione_

_P.S. You did enchant the locket, and I’m going to figure out what you did to it._

* * *

_April 1925._

Before Tom left, he suggested that she might want to wear his mother’s locket. She never did, and he had noticed it.

“The style is very old-fashioned,” she said, fingering its surface. That wasn’t the full truth. There was a strange pull from the object, the very same one that she felt from his family ring. She honestly found it disturbing, but she did not want to tell Tom that. It was very old, after all, and who knew what kind of magical residue it held? But it was an heirloom, apparently a relic of Salazar Slytherin, and it would offend him if she told him she was afraid of it.

Tom clearly did not buy that excuse either. “It may be, but you could just wear witch’s robes. Who cares what’s fashionable in Muggle circles? Muggle women wear shapeless dresses and strings of beads these days. I’d like you to wear this, since you can’t wear the ring.”

She took it and slipped it over her head. It was foolish to fear the object, really. Old artifacts often had detectable magical resonance. Most of the time it was benign. This was important to him, and she wanted to make it up to him now. She wanted to make everything up to him.

* * *

Hermione had no tea remaining in her teapot by now. She had drunk it all up to attempt to soothe the monumental anxiety that his most recent letter had put into her brain.

It was not anxiety over the obnoxious Selina Marsh. Oh no, nothing that benign. Instead, Tom had hared off with his newfound “friends” to visit the city of Innsmouth, where the woman had come from originally, and he had discovered exactly how bad the deterioration in that town really was.

He had also learned the answer to the mystery of the local legend surrounding advanced water beings.

 

_Hermione, if you can believe it, they actually bred with these things. Marsh is descended from that. There was a cult surrounding the creatures, and the residents lost all interest in anything except this cult. It had ritual blood sacrifice, sexual rituals, anything dark you can imagine. It’s revolting. These people actually were all right turning into half-amphibian things in order to gain the immortality that these creatures promised. It was wholly unnecessary. Hermione, I mean this very seriously. Do try to stop me if I express interest in… taking something unnecessarily farther… something that I strongly suspect would destroy my good looks. Won’t you?_

 

It got worse after that bizarrely cryptic plea. The fish-frog hybrids—or the sea creatures themselves—attempted to sacrifice the visitors, especially Tom, though Mayor Waite was not to have been let off. The woman Marsh, it seemed, would have been given a reprieve due to her blood.

 

_They’re going to send in a battalion of Aurors to clean this nest out. In my opinion, that is several decades overdue._

 

Hermione could not agree more. It was long past time for Tom to get out of that crazy area and come back home.

 

_As a side note, I’ve also learned what is the significance of the term “half-blood” here, and why it is a slur. It does not mean the same thing here that it does in Britain. Here, it means “part-human”—and, my dear, before you object in righteous indignation on behalf of your friends Fleur and Hagrid, it means a very specific sort of part-human here. The sort, I need not explain, that infested Innsmouth. It turns out that the Arkhamites have very good reason to distrust part-humans._

_So that is why the people of Arkham all consider themselves pureblood. To them, it means pure human. Arkham being what it is, it seems not to matter whether that human heritage is wizard, Squib, or Muggle._

_Incidentally, you needn’t worry about me and Marsh. For one thing, I’d much rather be married to a pureblood. (Did you ever expect that would be said of you?) If you had seen Innsmouth, you would understand. I would prefer to father humans who can cast spells and talk to snakes, not frog-people who loaf about docks and worship Dark creatures._

_For another, she is a middle-aged woman who looks at me with her protuberant eyes as if I’m a piece of meat. Even if I were in the market, which I should reassure you that I am not, that doesn’t appeal to me. It is also disrespectful of you, and that doesn’t please me either._

_Finally, the person I want is you._

 

Hermione closed her eyes and smiled in spite of herself.

 

_I knew you would come around to me. Don’t ask how I knew that. I’ll tell you when I return, unless you figure it out for yourself first._

* * *

_May 1925._

Hermione was not sure if the change in her thoughts was the locket’s doing or the result of her epiphany about the Weasleys—or some of both. The object had a hold on her, no mistake about it. She found herself not wanting to take it off, even in the bath.

Even in bed.

It whispered to her in her dreams, in English and Latin and the strange snaky language that Tom could speak.

The day she received his letter about the Dark creatures, she had nightmares about his safety in that awful place. She woke up in the middle of the night clutching the locket in her hand. It was hot to the touch, though not enough to burn. _Could my hand really have…._

Hermione threw on a dressing gown and headed to their large and very well-stocked library.

Six hours and many diagnostic spells later, she had figured the situation out. That certainly explained a lot. It was a relief, too. He was never in danger from possessed, murderous lunatics or a population of Merlin-knew-what, shamefully tucked away into a decrepit seaport—at least, not real danger, the danger of permanent death. The danger of leaving her for the rest of this life.

Why had she ever disapproved of his knowledge of the Dark Arts? That was unwise. It didn’t even feel like herself. Honestly, it almost felt like the memory of disapproval belonged to someone else.

She slipped the locket back around her neck.

* * *

_By the time you receive this, I will probably be back within an hour._

 

Hermione sat in the foyer of their home, waiting, waiting. She had been there for close to the appointed hour. He was going to arrive by Portkey, appearing in the magically protected entrance of the house, unseen by Muggles. She, however, would see him through the glass in the front door.

What would happen once he returned? Hermione hoped that his reassurances in the letter about Innsmouth were sincere. It was sometimes hard to tell with him what was a true statement and what was not. If he had been honest in that letter, they would embrace and kiss and maybe, just maybe….

A sonic explosion rocked the house as Tom popped into being. He had his fine robes over a dapper pinstripe suit. His hair, normally perfectly coiffed and not a hair out of place, had been mussed by the Portkey travel. It suited him, Hermione thought with a thump of her heart. Winded a bit, he stretched, turned around to face the door, and went inside the house.

She stood there, taking in his appearance, his presence, the fact that he was _there—_ that he had come back to her despite so little encouragement for over two years.

_Of course he did,_ a voice very like his whispered in her mind. Involuntarily she touched the locket around her neck.

His gaze had followed her movements, and as her thin fingers brushed the surface of the thing, a smug, satisfied smirk tugged at his lips. “Hermione,” he said.

She strode forward and threw her arms around his neck.

He smirked again as he returned the embrace.


	2. The Other Library

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Library." Certain that the Head Boy is up to something, Hermione looks for questionable information in a secret library provided by the Room of Requirement. She's not alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a prompt fill ("Library"). I wanted it to be a bit different from Restricted Section fic. It’s set in an AU where Hermione was born in Tom’s time. They are both sixth years here.
> 
>  **Warning** : Dubcon physical closeness.

Hermione paced before the entrance to the Room of Requirement, her heart pounding.

_I need the place where all the Dark Arts books are kept._

After two attempts, the outline of the door appeared in the stone wall. Hermione heaved a breath and darted inside, closing it carefully behind her. She gazed around inside.

It was not exactly the same as the Room of Hidden Things. Instead of being filled to bursting with all manner of clutter, the room was packed only with books. Some were merely dusty and aged. Others appeared to be… _wiggling_ a bit. Faint, almost inaudible wails echoed around the room from others. The room was lit dimly by a black iron chandelier.

 _“Homenum Revelio,”_ Hermione whispered, holding her wand tip out. Nothing happened. She let her breath out in relief.

Hermione was certain that the male Slytherin sixth-year prefect, Tom Riddle, was up to no good. Lately he had been spending a _lot_ of time in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library, but he had been coming away from it with scowls of discontent on his face. Then there was that Slug Club meeting earlier this year. She had left the meeting punctually, but she had heard the Slytherin boys laughing with Professor Slughorn for some time afterward—and then Riddle himself had stayed behind for a one-on-one talk with the professor about _something._ Hermione had lurked in the hall under a perfect Disillusionment Charm, ear pressed against the door to try to hear what they were saying, but she only caught bits of it. Slughorn had looked extremely disturbed when the private talk was over, however, and Riddle had looked ecstatic—but not in a good way. Whatever Riddle was seeking information about, Hermione was sure that it was Dark.

She had learned about this incarnation of the Room of Requirement while trying to investigate the attacks last year. Everyone was sure that what was going on was Dark Magic, and Hermione did not want to be caught in the Restricted Section reading Dark Arts material—it was her plan to become Head Girl—so she went to the seventh floor and asked the Room for the books. It had produced them. The Room apparently held enough banned books to stock a separate Dark Arts library, a secret second library in the castle.

 _“Lumos,”_ she cast in a whisper. The tip of her wand lit up.

Hermione eased around the secret library, holding her light to the bookshelves, looking for any that were dust-free and therefore had been recently handled. The room was utterly silent except for her own footsteps. It was eerie, and every flutter of movement—or imagined flutter—made her jump.

At last Hermione reached a bookcase that had been disturbed. A single volume, bound in black leather, stood out to her amid its shelf-mates: It had been wiped clean of dust. Hermione removed the book from the shelf and opened it.

It was one of the wailers. A faint, ghostly cry echoed from it, making Hermione’s heart pound in anxiety, but she gritted her teeth and turned to the title page: _Secrets of the Darkest Art._

It would figure.

 _I need a place to sit down,_ she thought idly—and the Room delivered. Specifically, it delivered her a Victorian-style couch upholstered in thin black velvet. She sat down and began to pore through the book. Her eyes grew wider and wider.

 _On the enchantments of the Inferius,_ read one section, opposite a ghastly moving woodcut of an undead corpse.

Hermione gave a shudder. Surely _this_ wasn’t what Riddle was interested in. No—it couldn’t be. Hermione knew for a fact that the Restricted Section held books with this information. It was even a topic in sixth year Defense Against the Dark Arts. Distasteful as it was, it wasn’t _hidden._

She flipped to the next section: _On the nature and magics of Possession._ That was a bit more promising. She certainly had not heard this topic discussed in Defense, nor had she read anything about it in the main library. And it was dodgy enough that it could have been what Riddle had mentioned to Slughorn that one night. Hermione perused the section intensely, her alertness diminishing as she became engrossed in the book. It was rather appalling reading, to tell the truth—possessing someone, unlike the Imperius Curse, was a form of Dark Magic that could not be fought off by the victim.

Then Hermione read this: _“In order to psychically possess a victim, one must be able to abandon one’s own Body and return to it at will. In its natural state, the Soul is unable to do this, as abandonment of the Body by the Soul constitutes death. A Dark wizard may, however, seize advantage from the Split that occurs in the act of Murder and acquire deathlessness. The final chapter of this book describes the procedure and requirements.”_

With a sick feeling developing in her gut, Hermione turned to the final section: _On the creation of the Horcrux._ She began to read.

This, then, was what Riddle was up to. He had been looking for information on _this._ –Had found it, it seemed, since the book had been recently handled.

 _What am I going to do now?_ Hermione thought. _If I show this book to Dippet, I’ll incriminate myself for even knowing about this room. And what evidence do I really have? The book isn’t dusty, so therefore Tom Riddle must have been reading it? That’s not good enough for anyone. I could present it to Slughorn,_ she thought, _but what if Riddle was asking him about something else entirely? Face it, Granger, this is a hunch, not empirical evidence. I should have thought this through better than I did. There’s no “step two” in this plan._

“Fascinated, are we?”

Hermione whirled around, slamming the book shut. Riddle himself stood behind her. How long had he been there? She hadn’t heard him at all. She had been engrossed in the book.

She stood up, leaving the book on the seat and drawing her wand—but he drew his just as quickly.

“What are you doing here, Riddle?” she demanded, trying to put authority into her voice.

He smirked, staring at her, not answering.

She moved closer. Her knees bumped against the seat of the couch.

“Awfully _threatening,_ aren’t you, Granger?” he said in a soft voice. “Considering what you just got caught reading, I don’t think you’re in a position to make threats.”

She pressed the tip of her wand against his neck. “You’ve read it too. Don’t lie. You asked Professor Slughorn about this, didn’t you?”

Riddle flicked his wand upward, its tip reaching her forehead. His lips curled into an asymmetrical smirk. “I knew you were lurking in the hall that night,” he said. “I’m not afraid of you, Granger. If there is one thing I know about you, it’s that you are far too _arrogant_ to involve authority figures in anything. You talk about it, but when you have to choose, you’re determined to handle things yourself.”

“You’re wrong,” she hissed. “You’re wrong. I’ll take this book to the professors—”

“No, you won’t.” With his free hand, he reached for the tip of her wand, still pressed into his neck. He eased it away, the smirk on his face growing as she did not resist. “You couldn’t stand to see me expelled. You’re fascinated with me.” His tone was almost sultry.

Hermione sputtered, feeling the blush creep up her cheeks. “I am not! How dare you say that!”

“You are,” he said menacingly. “The entire reason you came into this room is your _obsession_ with me.”

“I am _not_ obsessed with you!” she exclaimed. “I have known that you were up to no good, and I was determined to find out what you were looking for that you couldn’t find in the Restricted Section—and what you asked Professor Slughorn about—”

“The fact that you’ve noticed these things proves that you’re obsessed with me. Nobody else has.” He lowered his wand from her forehead and eased—almost _slithered—_ around the corner of the couch.

He was facing her, and there was nothing between them. Her wand arm fell to her side.

“I should tell someone about this—I should tell Slughorn; he already knows—he’d believe me—”

He reached a hand to her face and cupped her cheek. His index finger trailed along the sensitive skin behind her ear.

 _Why am I letting him touch me?_ she screamed at herself in thought. _Why why why—_

She knew why.

There was a ring on his finger, gold with a large black stone. She had seen him wearing it before, something he said was from his wizarding family—how jealous she had been, after years of thinking that they were both outsiders to the wizarding world—that she had that, too, in common with him, in addition to being top of the class. Hermione expected the ring to be cold, but it wasn’t. It was warm—and something else. Something _off._

_“You want this.”_

It was the faintest ghost of a whisper, but Hermione could have sworn that she heard it next to her ear. Was she hearing things now?

“It would be a terrible shame,” Riddle purred.

 _To be expelled, or to hurt me?_ she thought.

She closed her eyes involuntarily as he ran his index finger across the skin behind her ear once again. He chuckled.

Then he shoved her forcefully onto the black velvet couch. Her eyes flew open as he descended upon her.

Their legs dangled off the seat, but he was pressed against her from their hips to their chests. The closeness was shocking—embarrassing—and rather a bit more, something that Hermione was not about to admit to herself. She was not going to acknowledge just how much she liked this degree of intimacy and how much she wanted to repeat it, perhaps in the corridors, abandoned classrooms, maybe even the bookshelves in the library. Riddle was unattainable; he had many female admirers but no female companionship. He even turned down the girls who just wanted to snog him. Why was he _doing_ this to her— _her?_ It was just to make her uncomfortable, she was sure. Somehow he _did_ know about the secret direction that her imagination had occasionally gone, late at night….

But this was not how her plan was supposed to have gone. She ought to go to Slughorn about all of this—

He pulled his hand away and clenched it into a fist, thrusting the ring before her lips. The smirk on his face vanished.

“Let me go,” she demanded, trying to sound stronger than she felt. “You have _no_ right—”

“Guess what this ring is, _Hermione.”_

He had used her first name. He had never done that. When they had shared prefect duties, he always called her Granger.

“It’s your family heirloom, as you said,” she spat. “Now get _off_ me—”

“You didn’t have to guess that. You knew that. _Guess.”_

She stared back at him, challenging him, refusing to answer his question—and what did it matter, anyway? He was just stalling for time, trying to keep her supine and under his control like this.

He pressed the ring against her mouth. Involuntarily, almost against her will, her lips parted and the tip of her tongue touched the stone.

_“Good girl.”_

She definitely had not imagined it. Her thoughts suddenly converged, like the last few clues of a Muggle crossword puzzle all falling into place. The ring’s whispers, its heat, its inexplicable _strangeness,_ the Dark book she had just been reading—she gazed at his eyes, dark and cold, frightening eyes, and was sure she saw a gleam of red where there should have been white—

 _“That’s_ more like it, clever Hermione.”

She gasped and struggled beneath him, but he was much stronger. “You’re a Legilimens too?”

He smirked. “Of course… but you have bigger things than that to worry about if you were to tell anyone.”

“You murdered someone,” she spat. “You killed someone in cold blood and ripped your soul apart and still you _dare_ to threaten me—”

“He deserved it. Are you going to tell, _Hermione?_ Are you going to see me into Azkaban—except, of course, that I would never actually go there. Do you want to be my _enemy?”_ He paused. “Or my confidante? No one else knows. No one else is clever enough.”

She stared back at him. The smirk he bore was so obnoxious in its arrogance, so smug and cocky, that part of her wanted to wipe it right off his deceptively handsome face. That part of her wanted to see those eyes widen in shock and betrayal as Aurors carted him away. She would give him a smug little smirk of her own then.

And he would be locked away in Azkaban—or, as he said, escape custody and regard her forevermore as his lead enemy.

She was almost not conscious of shaking her head faintly, but he noticed.

The smirk widened. He leaned down and planted his lips on hers.


	3. Somewhere Else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The strange world that surrounds them is a study in shadows, sable trees against unnaturally monochromatic landscapes. No place is ever the same the second time they look at it, and everything looks unfinished, unraveled, like an abandoned sketch drawn by a mad artist.
> 
> Wherever this is, they are trapped there with not another soul—or part of a soul—present. They are utterly alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Prompt** : For the Tomione Halloween Challenge, I offer this supernatural tale.
> 
> I don’t even know what to say about this. Yes, Hermione is OOC, so let’s get that out of the way first. It’s dark and the premise is completely fucked up, but… sort of sweet? Anyway, I hope somebody likes it. I am pretty sure that this is also a no-time-travel AU.
> 
> **Warnings** : The premise/Hermione’s background might be too dark for some, and there is Weasley bashing at the end.

Pain. Pain beyond comfort, beyond enduring. She wants to close her eyes, cut off all her perception, but suddenly she can’t. Sounds are amplified. Images are brighter and more contrasting than she can imagine. And like the worst migraine she’s ever had, everything she sees and hears and feels makes the pain even worse.

_It hurts more than anything I’ve ever experienced._

There is still a source of warmth nearby, an entity that—even in the midst of this horrific torture that blasts most cogent thoughts from her mind—she somehow knows is familiar and incomparably intimate. She wants desperately to cling to it, but some inexorable force is tearing her away from it. The pain somehow, inexplicably, intensifies as a wave of cold blasts her. It’s more than cold; it’s cryogenic.

_I give up._

She stops resisting. Whatever dark painful force is pulling her away, she stops fighting and lets it pull. The cold does not become less so, but perhaps it’s so cold that it numbs her. Like a drowning victim finally giving up the fight, she lets the current engulf and carry her where it will.

The sounds and sights mercifully end, leaving her in a world of silent blackness. The acute pain suddenly ceases, leaving in its wake a dull throb, like an open wound. She tries to identify where the wound is, but she cannot isolate a specific source. It’s nowhere and everywhere. And still there is the cold.

_Maybe this is death. I’m about to die. Isn’t this what happens? If there is pain, it ends, leaving a startlingly clear state of mind._ There, finally a rational thought. A comforting thought.

She curls up and waits. As time passes—and she cannot say just how much time goes by—she does feel her mind clearing. The pain does not go away or even lessen, but she becomes used to it. The cold remains.

Slowly, gradually, it occurs to her that perhaps this isn’t death at all, but something else.

The silent darkness, formerly a comfort, suddenly becomes a horror. She has no perception of anything, not a surface to rest on, not even an atmospheric void to hurtle through. She cannot even feel the pull of gravity or the faint breezes of air movement. It’s as if there is suddenly _nothing._ She tries to open her eyes and clear her ears—but to no avail. She cannot perceive her own eyelids. Panic takes over.

_Shouldn’t my heart be pounding?_ she wonders. _Maybe I can’t tell through the cold._ She tries to feel for her chest.

A single flash of white pierces the darkness, then vanishes.

_There is something,_ she thinks. At last, a break in the ghastly monotony of nothingness. She has not managed to feel her heart, but _something_ happened. She knows, somehow, that she brought that white flash into being—which means that perhaps she could do it again. Finally, a plan: Try to do it again.

As her thoughts grow clearer, a memory lumbers back into her consciousness. It brings a flash of renewed pain, but at least it’s something to ground her.

_The body toppled to the ground in a flash of green._

_Who was that?_ she wonders as the memory plays back. It was important. She knows that this person was highly relevant to her current situation.

Another memory returns. _I need to find… him,_ she thinks. _He’s here, somewhere._ Although she again cannot name the person she’s thinking of, the conviction becomes overwhelming. An image floats to her mind, a pale young man with sable hair and dark eyes.

“Hermione?”

The first thing she notes is that she’s hearing once again. That realization is so powerful that she does not process what her new companion says immediately.

“Hermione?”

_That’s my name,_ she thinks. _There’s someone else here. Maybe it’s him._

By this time she’s accustomed to not being able to feel any parts of her body, but she sees—finally!—a glimmering, colorful, _identifiable_ figure nearby. He has the black hair, dark eyes, and pale skin that she remembered. He has a body—why doesn’t she?—although his form seems somehow _unfinished_ on the edges, and a pale glow surrounds him. His presence radiates warmth, the same kind of warmth that she remembers being ruthlessly torn away from. Tom. That was his name.

She tries to speak, but she can’t form words without being able to feel her mouth. A new wave of despair rushes over her. How could she tell him what was wrong or ask him questions?

_Tom,_ she thinks.

“I can hear you,” he replies, his lips moving.

_Well, I’m glad of that,_ she thinks. _What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I feel my body?_

He hesitates. “Hermione, things are different here.”

_Where is “here”?_

He hesitates again. “Technically, the inside of a diary.”

_What? How? I remember someone forced me in here. Who was it?_

He smirks ferally. “You, my dear.”

Before she can begin to comprehend why he would say that, his presence is upon her. His light, warm but harsh, envelops her, suffusing her with welcome heat. She relaxes. She isn’t nearly as cold when he is close. This is good. Maybe she can stay near him and it will be all right.

He senses her openness and immediately pounces—or rather, invades her. It’s not at specific places, but rather, everywhere at once. It almost feels like he… is mixing with her, except that they remain distinct entities, because she can tell where she ends and he begins.

Those are the places that hurt most.

Those are the wounds, everywhere and nowhere.

_What are you doing to me?_ she cries.

“I’m trying to make you feel better. You didn’t take it very well.”

_Take what very well?_

He doesn’t answer, but continues to press against and throughout her. She tries to pull away, but that means a return to the indescribable cold and the timeless nothingness. He is hurting her and invading her, but he is still warm and light—and as his presence continues to suffuse hers, she realizes that the heat he brings seems gradually to be making her hurt less.

“That’s as it should be. You almost lost yourself in the process. I didn’t know that could happen. I really didn’t.”

She perceives guilt in his words.

_What process?_ she asks.

He still doesn’t answer the question. “Your name is Hermione,” he murmurs. A hand— _no,_ she realized with a start, it wasn’t a hand; it was a tendril of light from his hand—strokes her, sending another jolt of warmth into her.

“Your name is Hermione,” he says again. “The process was… the final part of our private wedding ceremony. Try to remember.”

He was so bright. She focuses on him, trying to block out the impenetrable blackness. With the cold and the pain mostly gone, her mind is clearing at last. She thinks about his words. _Wedding ceremony…._

It comes to her in a flash of memory.

 

_She was dressed not in white, but in cold silver, facing him in determination. A bound, unconscious victim was raised before them, positioned upright with his feet off the ground, hovering in the air with his eyes closed. She held a book in hand and set it down on the stone that was between them and the victim._

_“Do it,” he urged her. “He deserves it. And I’m waiting for you to join me.” He gave her a wink, indicating a double meaning to his words._

_She smiled wryly. “I never thought I’d even consider this.”_

_“I’m very persuasive.”_

_“That you are.”_

_She turned to the unconscious body and raised her wand. “Avada Kedavra!”_

_Killing rips the soul apart._

 

“Do you remember now?” he asks.

_I think so. Oh, Tom, I shouldn’t have—what have I done—what—_

“Shhh. It’s done. We—they—will keep the vessel safe.”

_Yes, I remember now, but Tom—_

“We’ll never die. Either—any—of us. It’s what we wanted.”

Her storm of thoughts subsides. He was so warm, so bright and vivid.

_You were alone here for a long time._

“Yes, but I’m not now, and neither of us will be alone again.”

_How did you get a body?_

“Things are different here,” he says again. “Better. You can have anything you want, as long as you think of it. That’s how it works here. You have to think things into being.” He withdraws from her, against a protesting thought from her. “That memory shows what you look like,” he urges her. “Think of it again. That’s the body you had. Your form can actually look like anything you want it to, as long as you can imagine it, but… I like how you looked. Try to remember it.”

She does.

A white flash forms again, just as it had when she tried to feel the heartbeat that she did not have. This time, the flash doesn’t disappear.

The light grows and takes on shades of color. Hermione focuses on the memory, observing as her own form begins to take shape again and glow, just like his. She smiles—and feels it happen. She has a face again. She doesn’t need a mirror to see what she looks like; somehow she can be in two places at once now and look upon herself as she is, without needing a reflection. Her appearance is more beautiful and yet more terrible than the one in the memory, but it seems fitting for it to be so.

She notes that the edges of her—form—are fuzzy and blurred, just like his, and that minuscule tendrils of color and light seem to form continuously and then fade, only to be replaced by new ones. Flashes of pain, the same pain that had never entirely faded away, pass over and through her, focused now on these fuzzy, ever-shifting edges.

“I haven’t found a way to stop that,” he admits. “I think it happens because we’re… incomplete.” He reaches forward and touches her newly formed cheek, his dark eyes fluttering closed as he does.

He can still suffuse her with heat, and now she realizes that she had been filling him with heat all along as well.

“It still hurts for you?” The words are out of her mouth before she realizes it. She is speaking again.

He smiles darkly. “I don’t think that ever stops either. But—” He extends his hand and strokes the side of her face.

“It was your idea for me to use the same object,” she remembers. “I see why. I _remember_ why. Our theory that it would be better for us to keep each other company….”

“Yes, we always did push the boundaries of magic.”

* * *

Her memories return, much to their relief. It’s wonderful. It’s _grounding._ It fills her imagination with images, sounds, and thoughts—bits she can use to create her surroundings.

That, he says, is how things work in this state of being. He’s been here for months longer than she has, and apparently he did not ever lose access to his identity and memories in the trauma. He knows what he’s talking about.

He shows her his landscape first, the one he created while waiting for her to come. The strange world that surrounds them is a study in shadows, sable trees against unnaturally monochromatic landscapes. No place is ever the same the second time they look at it, and everything looks unfinished, unraveled, like an abandoned sketch drawn by a mad artist.

She tries to add to his landscape. A flower sprouts from the impossible ashen-green ground. It looks poisonous. Black tendrils ripple in and out of being, giving the appearance of waving freely around the sickly white blossom.

“I can’t make fixed boundaries either,” he admits. “I don’t know if it’s just the nature of thought or if it is another consequence of our… condition.”

_So it’s not exactly “anything you want,”_ she muses. Her thoughts can be kept private now. She’s learned how to do that.

“What about books?” she asks him. “Are they readable?”

He smirks. “Of course you would ask about that. They are.”

A tome appears in his hands, edges fuzzy and vibrating. He hands it to her. “This is from my memories. We can only call up the ones we’ve read before, unfortunately.”

A cold chill ripples over her body. “An eternity, and a finite amount of knowledge?” That sounds a lot like hell to her.

“But we can create anything!” he protests. “We can write new ones.”

She hands the book back to him, and it unravels and fades away.

* * *

When the shock wave hits, it’s rather like an earthquake. Hermione curls up, arms wrapping around her legs, as her form trembles. Tom, she observes, is doing something similar, sprawled on the surface, staring at the pink sky through the silhouetted black trees.

Finally it ends. She rises. A memory is flooding her, a memory of them in a stone ruin in Ireland, a memory she is sure she did not ever experience. He squints, confused, and shakes his head as if to clear it. She realizes what it means, what just happened.

“They just put some new memories into the vessel,” she says. It’s so _strange_ to speak of her corporeal self as one of a “they,” but at this point, it feels unavoidable.

He gazes at her. A smile breaks over his face. “That’s a relief,” he says. “That’s a huge relief.”

“So we will have new knowledge after all.”

“We need to interact with them,” he muses. “They haven’t written to us yet, but if I can just figure out how to do it….”

Suddenly, the future holds promise.

* * *

The first messages arrive as another shock. Black strokes rip apart the pink sky of their mindscape, leaving a message too large to read. They simultaneously come to a conclusion about what must be done.

That happens a lot now. She supposes it’s because they are open on the edges, the edges that still hurt a bit and still send slight chills through their forms. When they touch, it helps a lot—the cold and pain almost cease entirely—but it would stand to reason that thoughts bleed across the unraveled edges.

They bring a very large book into existence, resting on a podium. It’s large enough for both of them to write at once if they want, one on each side of the opened tome. They force the words to appear on these pages instead of rending their world apart. They control this place. It’s their party.

As they write back and forth to their other selves, she feels a pull that she has not felt since the first awful trauma. There is that _other_ warm glow, the one that feels intimate and personal. It’s not here—there is an intangible barrier—but it is nearby. It’s especially strong when she writes.

She realizes what it means.

“Do you think we should do it?” she asks him.

He thinks about it. “I don’t know what the consequences would be. I don’t know if we even _could_ possess our other selves, to be honest.”

She supposes that it’s just as well. With new knowledge and memories being given to them, this really isn’t so bad. They have a home, a thought-form that they keep perpetually established. They don’t even have to travel to get to it. Whenever they want it, it’s there. It has an ever-expanding number of rooms, grand halls, secret passages…. They have also learned how to bring out whole stretches of memory to explore. It’s rather like using a Pensieve, except that it doesn’t require a basin and they no longer need wands to do anything. Memories, they discover, are also less fuzzy and more stable than imagination forms.

He wonders how large the landscape of a given memory may be—whether it is a snapshot of the entire world, or if they cannot actually explore places in a memory that they didn’t know. They decide to explore one to find out, and it appears to be something in between. They are not limited to reenacting exactly what happened in the memory, side-by-side with the memory frames of themselves. They have freedom now to go elsewhere. If they go someplace that didn’t feature in _that_ memory, but that they have _other_ memories of, then it appears the same as any memory. Their memories, it would appear, fuse together cohesively, as they would not have done in a Pensieve.

_It makes sense,_ she thinks, _since Pensieve memories are discrete threads. This is actually everything in our minds._

But if they try to enter a place that they’ve never been, it is chimeric and fuzzy.

It has become rather nice to have two distinct worlds to live in, the more rigid and accurate one of memories, and the world of phantom edges and unreal colors that they can create.

* * *

He wants to know what happens when they try to be intimate in the way that they could physically. She is willing to find out.

Their bodies look as they want them to. They appear to have the necessary anatomy. It’s different, though. It doesn’t feel quite like physical nerve endings and tactile pleasure. Instead, it is heat, warmth, and comfort—the same kind they feel whenever they touch—but on an immense scale, not localized as it was in the physical world. They revel in each other’s nearness. It hurts, too, those ever-sensitive frayed edges prickling with the remembrance of what used to be, but as always, touching another soul—even if it’s not the rest of one’s own—helps with that. She has felt this before, she realizes, the very first time she saw him here and his presence filled hers. There was less joy then and more relief from pain and terror.

She actually feels closer to him this way than she could in a physical body.

Yes, it’s different, but now that they know they can do this too, it makes this strange world very bearable indeed.

With so much that they can do and create, time passes, but they don’t have the same sense of that. The diary interface and the dated memories tell them how much time goes by, but as the years mount, it really doesn’t feel like it. They observe from the memory dumps that their corporeal halves are showing the telltale signs of aging, but interestingly, their other halves’ self-perceptions are still of a young couple in the prime of life. That’s exactly how their own bodies appear. They can make themselves look however they please, after all.

* * *

Eventually they start to talk to others. There is a pair of red-haired young adults who write to them now. She converses with the guy, he with the girl. It’s rather tiresome, honestly. This fellow never does much but complain about jealousy of his best friend, apparently Seeker for the English national Quidditch team, or offer up facile anecdotes of some foolish prank that his brothers pulled. It seems that they run a joke shop and he clerks at it.

Tom finds the woman just as tiresome. She seems to desire the attention of the same Seeker-star best friend of her brother, and more often than not she’s the victim of the older brothers’ pranks. Tom finds the whole thing pitiful. It’s like a pair of schoolchildren, except that these people purport to be grown adults.

They no longer write to their “counterparts.” She rather misses it, what with the vapidity of the conversation topics that the brother and sister provide. At the same time, they both sense that their physical counterparts hid something from them before they stopped writing, something big and important. They seem to be growing stronger by the day, something that didn’t happen when they wrote to themselves. In fact, the more they write to the insipid redheads, the stronger they feel….

Tom seems to know that something is coming. She asks him what it is, what he anticipates—no, _dreads_ is more like it—but he won’t say. Then one day their world is upended—again.

* * *

They are writing side by side when his presence suddenly starts to fade. The landscape breaks apart into bits as he is pulled away and her attention is diverted from it. A ragged black hole appears in the sky as his form is drawn away inexorably. The air grows cold and the long comfort that he gave her by his proximity gives way to pain again, pain that seems to be reaching a crescendo of intensity just as strong as it was when she first came here.

Then she finds it happening to her too—but instead of being drawn after him, she’s taken through a different tear in the sky. She can no longer see or hear or feel him.

Utter panic overtakes her at the idea that perhaps those redheaded brats are trying to destroy the vessel. That would wipe her and Tom right out of existence. _No!_ she screams in thought as she is pulled into a tunnel.

But she doesn’t seem to be ceasing to exist. If anything, she’s becoming stronger by the second—stronger and more solid. The blackness is also fading, and it’s being replaced with a dimly lit hall of some sort. There are outlines of stone walls, towering arches… a statue, perhaps….

She gazes at him in shock. They have bodies again, glowing and vivid. On the stone floor are two lifeless forms, each with red hair. They are too busy gazing at these forms—and their own new bodies—to notice the white wisps in the distance.

Wisps that have their faces.

The ghostly specters rush at them, and then they notice.

It’s a battle for supremacy as their newly minted bodies are invaded. Hermione again feels that intimate warm presence, the presence of herself.

_We should reconnect,_ she thinks. _It’s right. It’s what should be._

Her counterpart rejects that. She feels herself forcibly disconnected from her own body. It hurts.

The cold, the cryogenic cold.

The pain.

She’s forced back into the dark tunnel and into the void once more, but this time, she hangs on to her memories and identity and sanity. She can’t muster the mental energy to maintain a thought-body, but she can stay as a white glowing ball this time.

The connection breaks, and she stops. It’s dark, but she knows what she can do.

_So they wanted to steal the bodies for themselves,_ she thinks, but she can’t hold a grudge over it. Their counterparts are the ones who are used to having physical bodies. It seems rather a limitation to her now, but she wonders how long they had to do without. Once they start to write again, she supposes she’ll find out.

He’ll join her soon, and she decides to have things ready for him when he does. She calls forth a memory of a great library. Walls of bookshelves, balusters, tall draped windows, and plush seats fill the landscape. She relaxes, then thinks of how she wants to appear. The vague glow takes shape and color once again.

He is later to arrive, but he finally does. His glowing form regards his surroundings, radiating relief and approval, and then he assumes the form that she knows so well.

“Are you all right?” They blurt the question at each other at the same time, then laugh.

“I wondered if you might win the fight for that body,” she remarks.

“I think I might have,” he admits, “until I realized that you were back here. I won’t leave you. That was our plan. Our counterparts will have eternity, and so will we.”

“I was worried that those people might destroy the diary,” she says uneasily. “And if our counterparts have to do that again someday….”

He smirks. “I don’t think they will. I was able to hover on the outside of the diary just long enough to hear them. They think the bodies will remain timeless, because they took them over before we were fully pulled from the diary—so the bodies are still linked to it. They’re going to put the diary itself under the Fidelius Charm. We’re safe.”

When they draw close and touch, she feels the familiar shot of heat pierce her. She recalls the intimate warmth she felt when she shared the new body with herself. But now, he is even warmer.


	4. Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because the death of Voldemort has only enraged wizarding terrorists into making more attacks, the Ministry authorizes a mission to change history. The plan: Kill Tom Riddle as a child. But Hermione Granger won’t allow that. She decides instead to keep him from entering the wizarding world. He’ll just live as a Muggle who occasionally has strange things occur near him. Nothing that bad could happen, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning: This is very dark.** Think _Fantastic Beasts_ meets _X-Men: First Class_ with a sprinkling of _Doctor Strange_ , just a lot darker than any of those.

_Autumn 1999._

Diagon Alley—or what remained of it—was under lockdown. The Ministry was doing full-body magical scans of everyone entering, which brought foot traffic in and out of the building to a slow trickle. As an Unspeakable who had earned clearance to work on top-secret projects, Hermione Granger was at least allowed to enter the express security line. The Aurors scanned her and gruffly permitted her to enter the atrium to report to work.

Grim and inconvenient as it was, the intense security was probably necessary, Hermione allowed to herself as she entered the magical lift. The death of Lord Voldemort the previous year had not quelled the violence. If anything, there was _more_ violence now, and it had spread across Europe and into Russia, as wizarding terrorists inspired to avenge the fallen Dark Lord launched horrific attacks with little warning. Although Hogwarts remained free following its liberation in May of last year, Durmstrang had fallen to the terrorists and was now apparently a training base.

Things that no one had seriously considered doing, even during the Death Eater years, were now researched openly by the terrorist groups. Most destructively, they had figured out how to dramatically enlarge the explosion of an Erumpent horn with potion ingredients. Only last week, someone had detonated such a magical bomb in Diagon Alley, destroying half the stores—including Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes—and killing dozens. Mrs. Weasley and George were killed outright in the blast, and Ron was still in St. Mungo’s with severe head trauma. The immediate injury was healed, but he was probably going to be in the long-term resident ward. Hermione had never thought much about it, because wizards’ skulls were so much tougher, but if a wizard _did_ receive a bad head injury, there was no quick-and-easy spell to reverse the psychological results of brain damage.

She felt an explicable sense of personal guilt about Ron. After the Battle of Hogwarts, during the first few blissful weeks in which they imagined they were free of the threat of violence, she and Ron had basically had the fog of war lifted from their minds. They had decided, by unspoken mutual agreement, that they were _not_ what each other needed in a partner, and it was best to remain friends and not to speak of that kiss in the battle. It had been the rational thing to decide, Hermione knew—and even now, she still realized that. They would not have made each other happy; after all, they never really had been happy even as friends, except when Harry was there to anchor the trio—and sometimes not even then. But she still felt a pang of _irrational_ guilt about the fact that it was Padma Patil who had been with him during the blast while Hermione was working at the Ministry, Padma who had helped him out of the rubble, Padma who was practically living in the Janus Thickey ward now….

Hermione pushed the conflicting thoughts from her mind, focusing instead by force of will on what she was going to have to do in the office. Although she was the most junior Unspeakable, that did not prevent her from speaking her mind, and the plan that the new Minister—appointed after Kingsley Shacklebolt’s disappearance in Romania two months ago—had devised was a truly awful one. She very much hoped that they did not go through with it. It was wrong, immoral, disgusting.

The lift stopped, though not yet on her floor, and Harry walked in. He gave her a nod and a sad smile. What was there to say? She could not even complain to him about what was happening at work, because he was an Auror-in-training and wasn’t authorized to know.

* * *

Hermione stared at her boss in disbelief. “You’re actually doing this? Our own opinion counts for nothing?”

“Against the orders of the Minister, it counts for nothing,” the witch said grimly. “I expressed my concerns to him about the wizard rights conflict in this plan, but he was adamant that we do it. He is concerned that the attacks are so deadly now that they are going to render the wizarding population unsustainably low in short order. We’re facing extinction if this doesn’t stop, Miss Granger—at least in Europe and Britain. And according to the Magical Security Act, since we are under a state of emergency, his orders are final. We’re doing it today.”

Frantically she pleaded with her boss. “At least let me take my best friend,” she urged. “He killed Voldemort. Otherwise he’ll be left behind in this timeline, while we Unspeakables will wind up in another.”

The witch smiled sadly. “I wish I could, but it won’t be necessary for you to do that. We’re not creating a new branch. We’re going to use a device that alters this timeline.”

Hermione gasped. “That is _incredibly_ dangerous—”

“Minister’s orders. He thinks this is the kindest way. The preserved memories of Albus Dumbledore indicate that Riddle was already a vicious bully by age eleven.”

“We’re sentencing a child to death for bullying?”

The woman’s face was hard. “One life, instead of all the lives he and his followers have taken. It is for the greater good. If all goes according to plan, the memories of those who stay here will change according to how events unfold. If you stay, as is the plan, you won’t even know anything changed.”

Hermione’s brown eyes widened in horror. “I don’t _want_ to forget,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “These things _happened._ I don’t want….”

The Head Unspeakable gazed compassionately at Hermione for a moment. Then she stood up and walked quietly through the door of the conference room.

Hermione remained in the room alone, allowing panic to take over her thoughts, until finally a single thought pierced through the cloud like a spell: _You still remember everything. They haven’t done it yet, but they soon will. Get into the room with the device and you won’t be affected. Do that and you’ll remember._

With that thought, she hurried away.

Just a little bit later, she opened the door quietly, looking very sheepish—and wearing the face and uniform of the department’s Deputy Head. Every Unspeakable had a ration of Polyjuice Potion, issued by the Ministry, so they could disguise themselves and protect their identities. No one had expected it to be used for this purpose.

The room was small, with only the Head Unspeakable herself there. In the center, on a marble-topped table, a round gold object rested. The witch nodded at Hermione, then drew her wand and pointed it at the device. A plate covering the front of it opened, bathing the small room in eerie green light. Hermione pointed her own wand at the device, her hand shaking. Together the two witches began to murmur the complicated spell that would send them back in time to summer 1938….

* * *

_1938._

Despite the fact that they had purposely arrived in the middle of the night, when no one would be in the Ministry to observe their presence, it was still imperative to get out of the Ministry at once. Hermione gripped the hand of her boss and Side-Along Apparated to the grounds of Hogwarts. School was not in session right now. Using the Hogsmeade passage, they snuck into the school. Hermione felt a pang as she passed by the familiar halls.

“The address of the place is in the Deputy Headmaster’s office,” the older witch murmured. She pushed open a door, and Hermione felt tears well up in her eyes, much to her dismay. Most of Albus Dumbledore’s painfully familiar collection of artifacts was already present, adorning the office despite the absence of its owner at the moment.

Hermione’s boss ignored this and swept over to the desk coolly. She summoned the list of Hogwarts students and scanned the list. Hermione managed to pull her gaze away from the contents of the office just in time, as she felt her Polyjuice mask fade away.

Her boss stared at her. _“Granger?”_

Hermione pointed her wand. “I won’t let you murder a child. _Stupefy!”_

The witch froze and dropped to the floor. Hermione peered over her fallen form. _“Obliviate,”_ she murmured. Her plan was to carry the witch back to Hogsmeade and leave her behind a store, where she would be found and taken to St. Mungo’s. It was cruel, perhaps, but no crueler than what she had done to literally _everyone_ in the future. In fact, it was rather the same thing.

Hermione gazed at the list of names. It might have been best of all for someone to adopt Tom Riddle as an infant, but there was another option, even at this late date. She steeled herself for what she was about to do—a minor act, seemingly, but with vast consequences.

She cast a spell silently at the list and watched as the name _Tom Marvolo Riddle_ and the address of Wool’s Orphanage in London vanished, the names below it edging up the parchment to fill the empty space, leaving no evidence that it had ever been there.

Voldemort, living as a Muggle? Never being trained in his birthright of magic? _I really hope this was the right thing to do,_ Hermione thought as she levitated her boss off the floor.

Afterward, she Apparated back to the Ministry. Back to 1999 it was, then. Hermione very much hoped that it would be a better one.

* * *

_1940._

When the bombs began to fall over London, thirteen-year-old Tom Riddle hid in his room. He heard of people dying, but _he_ wouldn’t die. He would protect himself. The “special power”—the nameless ability that he _knew_ he had, whether that old bitch running this orphanage liked it or not—would keep him safe, if only he knew how to harness it.

He hid in his room, curled up under his bed, focusing on the blackness before his closed eyes. He did not notice until it was too late that the matron was evacuating the rest of the children to a bomb shelter. She didn’t look for him. No one looked for him.

He was not sure of it until later, but at the moment, he thought that perhaps a shadow—dark but comforting, his _friend_ —spread out from him, a shield, keeping him safe.

* * *

“Freak!” Billy Stubbs hissed afterward, dragging Tom out from under his bed. “Disgusting unholy freak! You were left here to die; why didn’t you?”

Tom snarled ferally at the loathsome boy, scurrying out of the way of his fists. For a brief moment, he noticed that his shadow, his ordinary shadow, seemed a bit larger than it should have been. It also seemed to have moved a bit when he himself had not. That was his special power, then, his _other_ shadow.

Stubbs glared at Tom, who was using his bed as a buffer zone between them. _“Turn around,”_ Tom hissed under his breath.

“What are you saying, freak?” Stubbs sneered—but he did turn. Tom smirked.

Stubbs turned his head one more time. “I heard that Mrs. Cole is going to call an exorcist on you,” he sneered as he left the room. “Think on _that.”_

 _“Trip,”_ Tom muttered as the boy left the room. In a second, the delightful sound of Stubbs crashing down the stairs in a sickening crunch echoed through the walls of the building. The boy screamed, clearly having broken a bone.

Tom smirked again. That old bag wouldn’t do anything of the sort. He would _make_ her not do it. He knew he could. The shadow was his protector, and it was part of him.

* * *

_1941._

Tom slipped out of the antique shop, his left hand caressing the Baroque-style emerald-encrusted silver jewel box he had nicked. According to the card that _had_ been before it in the store, and now also was in his pocket, it had purportedly belonged to a lady named Catherine Riddle, Baroness Hangleton, in the seventeenth century, and so he had to own it. It ought to have been his anyway. Surely that was his family. For a brief moment he fantasized about being discovered by a noble family and adopted as their long-lost heir.

Then the bomb hit four blocks away.

As the dust flew up, the buildings shook, and people around him scurried for cover, Tom curled up into himself.

The shadow could protect him. It was his special power, his shield, his protection from death. It could do things he couldn’t. It _wanted_ to protect him. He would die without it, he suddenly knew—a second bomb was going to strike any moment now, and it would be right over him, and if he _didn’t_ let the shadow save him, he would die. Tom could not explain how he knew it, but somehow he did. It was as if his special power allowed him to be just slightly outside time itself, or to know things before they happened.

For the first time, Tom gave the shadow full control. His body faded rapidly, turning into a dark cloud. He rose up in a whoosh and found himself suddenly peering down upon the sidewalk from thirty feet high.

The bomb struck where he, in his normal form, had just been standing.

The street exploded.

For a moment, Tom flew higher, attempting to escape the shock wave, but once it had passed, he found himself very angry. Who were these filthy creatures to attack _him?_ How dare they?

The bomber responsible was circling by for another round of attacks. Tom whipped a tendril of his shadow at the plane, catching its tail. It was yanked backward in flight and lashed downward, spiraling out of control, smashing into the top of a building.

That was good, Tom thought, but it wasn’t enough. He focused on the lesser beings on the sidewalk. They had tried to prevent him from doing this—from being strong, from using his special power. They would receive his wrath too— _all_ of them.

He paused, momentarily blending in with the clouds, and then blasted through the buildings that still stood on the bombed-out block. The lesser humans fell to the ground, instantly dead, their faces marked.

* * *

_1942._

Tom had run away. He no longer lived in the orphanage. He didn’t need to. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself now. He had learned how to change back to his normal state when he felt the urges of the shadow overpowering his rational mind. When he felt the urge to express his rage, he became the shadow. He could control it.

He still had his jewel box. He was not going to let that out of his sight. It was almost like a talisman, a protection against death, being indelibly associated now with the time that the shadow had saved his life.

He did not blast through blocks or attack the lesser beings as much anymore. There had been that one time last winter when he had had to hide himself away because a couple of people who he sensed might have been like him had come to investigate. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but somehow he could sense it on them. They could do some of the things that he could—and he knew that he did _not_ want them to find him.

They left shortly afterward, one of them telling the other reassuringly, _“It was an exaggerated Muggle report of a bomb, nothing to worry about.”_ Tom wondered what “Muggle” meant. He’d never heard that word before.

* * *

Tom was caught at last, but the man—the _wizard,_ according to the man’s own words—who had captured him insisted that he meant no harm.

“You are very special,” the man said. A gleam appeared in his eye, and a curious charm dangled from his neck—a sort of triangular eye, perhaps.

“I’m a wizard too? That’s what my power is—wizardry?”

“Definitely, and you’re a very powerful one, to be able to control an Obscurus.” The older man’s tongue darted out of his mouth briefly, as if to lick his lips in delight.

Tom was not entirely surprised; of _course_ he was very powerful. “What’s that? My other shadow?”

The wizard nodded. “I have seen it once before, but I was unable to save that wizard. The government killed him before my eyes. Your government would kill you too, though so far the fools have not accepted what it is that they are dealing with. You were very wise to attack only during bombing raids. It has confused them.” He held out his hand. “My name is Gellert Grindelwald. Come with me, away from here. I will see to it that you are trained in magic, as is your birthright, and in return you will help me. Together we can rule these Muggles.”

Tom stared Grindelwald in the face, meeting his eyes. At some point, he had discovered that he could read a bit of what people were thinking. It was certainly so with this wizard. Grindelwald was not lying, he discovered, to his delight.

Grindelwald’s eyes widened. “You have rudimentary Legilimency skills too, even though you’ve never been trained in magic. Yes, you are powerful indeed. I will see to it that your talents are cultivated as they should be, and that you can assume your rightful place in the world—the place that has been denied to you by everyone else.”

That sounded good to Tom. He reached out and took Grindelwald’s hand, and they Disapparated away.

* * *

_1945._

“I don’t feel well,” Tom confessed to Grindelwald.

The older wizard looked up from his work and covered the papers on his desk. He examined Tom with the gaze of a researcher studying a specimen.

“The Obscurus is sapping your life away slowly,” he said unhappily.

A cold shot of fear traveled down Tom’s body. He couldn’t die—he _couldn’t!_ The Obscurus, his other shadow, couldn’t kill him! It had _saved_ him!

“There is a way to separate the entity from you,” Grindelwald continued, “but… no Obscurial has ever survived the procedure.”

“So I’ll die slowly if I don’t get rid of it, and I’ll die quickly if you try to separate it. What can I do?” Tom whispered, the terror now filling his body with ice.

Grindelwald looked away, trying to come to a decision about something. He grimaced at his own thought process, then took a deep breath, resigned. “There is one thing. It is a very dark thing, but it _should_ enable you to… revive yourself… after the separation procedure. There is a grim price to be paid, though.”

“What price?”

“I’ll give you the book about it so you can read and then decide for yourself.” He sighed. “In the meantime, I will need your assistance in Obscurial form one last time, to duel Albus Dumbledore.”

Mercifully, Tom’s thoughts changed away from his own impending doom. Albus Dumbledore, Grindelwald had explained to him, was the Deputy Headmaster of Hogwarts. Hogwarts was the school of magic that Tom _should_ have attended from age eleven, but Dumbledore had custody of the list of young witches and wizards and apparently had chosen not to invite Tom. Dumbledore was therefore responsible for everything that had happened to Tom since then, and Tom was determined to have his revenge.

“In the Muggle war, the Allied forces are going to win,” Grindelwald continued. “As you know, I have had agents in both Allied and Axis governments, to prepare for either outcome. My sources inform me that the Allied Muggles are already preparing to turn on each other as soon as the war is over—that the Americans are developing terrible weapons that they intend to use against the Russians, and vice versa. I can use this to the advantage of wizards, and I will.”

Tom smirked to himself. He wanted to be a part of this, and although he did not even know what the dark thing was that he might do to save himself from his Obscurus, he was already determined to do it so that he could see this new wizarding order unfold.

* * *

Grindelwald and Dumbledore exchanged curses in a powerful lightning storm of magic, circling each other, Apparating and Disapparating to new locations to gain an advantage. The very ground cracked and grew heated.

Tom was lurking in the distance, under a Disillusionment Charm. This was the final communion with his other shadow, and he was determined to make it count. Even though it was killing him, it had saved him once, and it had helped to bring about the wizarding order. Victory was at hand now, and the plan was that Tom—with his shadow—would deliver the _coup de grace._

Grindelwald cast a curse at Dumbledore, who staggered and conjured a shield out of thin air. The curse struck the shield, sending a loud, deep ring through the air. It was time.

Tom turned over control to the Obscurus and rose up in the sky, a cloud of magical fury directed at the man before him.

For the briefest of moments, Albus Dumbledore locked eyes with the eyes that Tom had even in his Obscurial form.

_What has he done to you?_

The question blasted through Tom’s mind, and with it the realization that Albus Dumbledore was a Legilimens too.

_He plucked me from London and trained me in magic, which you refused to do._

Dumbledore looked troubled. _I did not know you were there. When did you come to Britain?_

_I was born in Britain._

_You should have been contacted about Hogwarts. Something went wrong—_

_Liar!_

Focusing all his fury on Dumbledore, Tom whirled towards the wizard. Dumbledore attempted to parry the attack with a curse, but Tom knocked him over flat. The wizard’s last breath escaped him, and his body withered, the marks of the Obscurus attack pockmarking his face.

Tom was so angry with the dead man that he only heard Grindelwald’s voice the third time the man called out to him.

_“Tom!”_

Tom stopped, swirling in a black cloud of crackling magic, and faced his mentor.

“Tom, you need to become human again. You did it. Now it’s time.” He flicked his wand, and from the spot where Tom had been concealed before his transformation, Catherine Riddle’s old jewel box flew through the air and into Grindelwald’s hand. He held it out.

Tom stared at the box. Yes—it was time. His thoughts calmed and became more human. He gazed upon the box, focusing his mind on what he had to do. Because of the circumstances immediately following its acquisition, this box had always meant protection from death to Tom. Now it would mean that in a literal way. Elegantly, gracefully, Tom transformed from a swirling shapeless force to a handsome young wizard. He stepped forward and accepted the box from Grindelwald, then placed it on the ground before him as he began the ritual that would render him deathless.

* * *

_1958._

Today was the day.

Tom had been separated from the Obscurus for thirteen years. The entity still swirled about in a protective bubble in a private room in Nurmengard, now the headquarters of the global wizarding empire that he and Grindelwald ruled. Tom was pleased that Grindelwald had not destroyed it. Despite the fact that it had almost killed him at the last, it had still saved his life years ago, and he did not forget that. Like Tom himself, it had deserved to be saved.

Today was the day.

The Muggles were again at war, this one immeasurably destructive. Grindelwald’s secret agents had incited Moscow to drop an atomic bomb on Western Europe, and the Americans had retaliated. Britain and France also had nuclear arsenals now for their own defense, the secrets shared freely with them by the Americans. The Muggles had abandoned their large cities en masse, not wanting to be in obvious nuclear targets. Muggle society itself had almost collapsed, with mass absences from work and school, widespread looting, and the attendant surge in parasitical petty crime that accompanied this type of civil disorder. They did not know it, but they were primed for a super-powered global savior to restore order and rule them benevolently.

Today was the day. No one but Tom and Grindelwald knew it, but Russian submarines had secretly crossed the Atlantic, permitted to do so by Imperiused Muggles charged with protecting the waters of the eastern Atlantic. They were going to launch a hydrogen bomb at New York City from close range. There would be no time for missile defense to activate….

But Grindelwald would be at hand.

* * *

From his safe position behind the invisible nuclear shield that the wizarding empire had developed, Tom watched as the Dark wizard stood atop the skyscraper. The bomb was frozen in midair, twisting slowly in the sky, as thousands of Muggles watched from the streets and millions watched live on their televisions.

Grindelwald smiled. He knew the inner workings of these bombs. His spies had told him all about it, even sending him schematics. He cast an array of spells at the weapon, disarming its detonator, transfiguring the fissile material to mere dirt, the core to ordinary air.

A harmless canister of ordinary materials now circled in the sky. With another sweep of his wand, Grindelwald broke the bomb apart.

As one, the Muggles gasped—but nothing happened except a shower of dust.

Grindelwald began his speech.

_“You have fought a war of incomparable devastation. Tens of millions lie dead, several cities uninhabitable ruins, wide swaths of formerly green landscape corrupted with nuclear radiation, all because your rulers betrayed you. Yes—they have betrayed you! They have left you to be slaughtered for their own nuclear chess game. But today, you have seen for yourselves that there is another alternative._

_“Magic is real._

_“It is real, and it can save you. As you have seen with your own eyes, we can protect you. Wizards and witches live among you. We mourn the terrible state of the world, and we offer a new course to you….”_

* * *

_1999._

The room was bathed in a green glow, which faded rapidly as Hermione closed the gold plate covering the time-travel device. She heaved a breath. She had done it. She had changed the future—but into what? Well, there was only one way to find out. Steeling herself for whatever she might find, Hermione headed to the door.

Hands seized her as soon as she opened the door. A hex struck her, and she fell unconscious.

* * *

Tom Riddle, Lord of Britain and Viceroy to Chief Archon Grindelwald, stalked into the cell where the “guest” was being held. From what he had seen, the memory probe of her had uncovered some astonishing information.

It appeared, in fact, that Tom owed her a debt of gratitude. He smirked to himself as he gazed upon his reflection in the mirror. It was almost unbelievable that he had made himself look like an Inferius in the world she had come from. What kind of foolishness _was_ that? Why would he have done such a thing to himself?

Or perhaps it was because that world was clearly a hellhole, in which stupid Muggles still ruled and the most that Tom himself had done was to stir up the “purebloods” in a bid to take over Wizarding Britain. What petty ambitions. _Here,_ he had acquired the Philosopher’s Stone from that tosser Flamel, who hadn’t even bothered to do anything with his long life, hiding away instead in his Devonshire estate. Tom was already deathless from the Horcrux, but now his body would not even age. No more would Grindelwald’s.

Perhaps this young woman could share in the prize. She deserved it, really. Tom claimed responsibility for his own actions, but still, he was not _ungrateful_ for help that others gave him. She had prevented the other witch from killing him at age eleven, and she had kept him from turning himself into a monster to be hated and despised. The Muggles did fear him—and rightly so—but they also loved him. After all, he smirked to himself, there had been no more nuclear attacks after Grindelwald had taken over the world. The wizards gave and the wizards could take away, and no Muggle wanted to go back to that. Furthermore, most of the Muggle leaders had surrendered, but those few—mostly generals and bootlickers who had counted on having the ear of their prime ministers and presidents—those few who had been so reluctant to cede power, who had resisted their rightful overlords, had been punished rather publicly. The general population of Muggles had learned what would happen to those who did not accede to their Greater Good.

Tom opened the door and smiled darkly at the bushy-haired young woman, who was disarmed and magically restrained. She glared at him as he strode over toward her.

“Hermione Granger,” he purred, smiling. “I am very much in your debt, it would seem.”

She sneered back at him. “I did none of this. I prevented someone from murdering a child. I meant to do good—to help the world.”

He smiled darkly. “So did we. And I do thank you for your help.”

“Do not _dare_ put this on me.”

He stroked her cheek, ignoring her flinching. “Oh, I don’t,” he agreed. “But you did make it possible. I am willing to offer you my gratitude, and, following your orientation and debriefing, perhaps even a place of importance. You are a witch of significant power, and this government rewards intelligence and magical power.” He sat down in a chair opposite her and pressed his palms together beneath his chin, staring at her thoughtfully.

She pulled away. “I will have nothing to do with this! I’m going to go back to the Department of Mysteries and undo this—”

Tom laughed. “Oh, I really don’t think you will. We control access to that room now. You have already been locked out.”

Hermione’s face fell in despair. She gazed about her, eyes wide and desperate. “Very well—I’ll fight you, then. I will be your opponent. I’ll—”

“Urge the Muggles to overthrow us?” he said harshly. “Wizarding Seclusion is _dead._ There is no Statute of Secrecy anymore. Muggles know who rules them. We are ruling them wisely, not torturing them for fun or killing them for sport. But if you stir them against us, it could lead to the _extermination_ of magic, not just in the human race, but in all magical species.”

She glowered at him, unable to formulate an argument.

He arose from his chair. “You will be treated with courtesy and dignity for as long as you remain here. And yes, Hermione Granger, I rather think you’ll see our point of view in time.”

With that, he left the room with a quick snap of the door.


End file.
